As we reported last September, Xobni rebranded its email contact manager Smartr and launched Android and Gmail apps out of private beta. Today, Xobni is debuting the iPhone version of Smartr.
The Smartr Cloud automatically extracts all contacts from your iPhone’s email data (currently integrated with Outlook or Gmail), as well as data from social networks, and makes them easily searchable. A complete profile is created for each contact, including a photo, job title, phone numbers, company details, email history, common contacts and info from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. → Read More
Last year, we wrote about email software company Xobni’s survey that showed that going completely offline from email over the holidays is a thing of the past. And this year’s survey from Xobni reports that even more adults will be checking email over the holidays.
According to the survey 79 percent of U.S. working adults have received work-related emails on the holidays; and 68 percent plan to check emails during Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.
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Xobni, the social email plugin that makes your inbox smarter, is going to make your Outlook email more productive today with the launch of a Gadget Store with apps from collaboration and productivity services such as Dropbox, Evernote, JIRA, Klout, Salesforce, WebEx, and Yammer.
Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail smarter (Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). The plugin integrates LinkedIn, Twitter Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers and more into your Outlook inbox. The company, which has raised over $30 million in funding, also recently debuted a plugin for Gmail as well as iPhone and Android apps. To date, Xobni’s Mirosoft Outlook plugin has seen nearly seven million downloads. → Read More
Ever since Xobni launched at the first TechCrunch 40, it’s been about Outlook and then Blackberry. But those of us who use Gmail also want to make our inboxes smarter. Today, Xobni is launching aprivate beta for Gmail, and will soon also launch iPhone and Android apps. The first 100 readers to sign up for the Gmail beta will get in (use the code XOBNI-TC100).
The Gmail app comes in the form of a browser extension for either Chrome or Firefox (Safari and IE will come later). Once you install it, a Xobni sidebar appears in your Gmail Inbox. Once you allow it to index your contacts and hook it up to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, it starts to show you all sorts of relationship data. Contact search in the Xobni box is hella fast, much faster than searching in the Gmail search box (but only for contacts, it does not index the entire text of your messages). → Read More
Right now I’m neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I’ve been here before . . .
Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some think that we planned all along to start a live platform, and that the Justin.tv show itself was a way of promoting that platform. While this ended up happening, none of it had crossed our minds at the time.
Emmett Shear and I had been working on Kiko, the first Javascript web calendaring application in the Microsoft Outlook style. We prototyped the application in our final year at Yale, went on to raise money from Y Combinator, then continued working on it for over a year.
Then Google Calendar was released—boom—absorbing most of our nascent user base and capturing most of the early adopter mindshare. But to be perfectly honest, Kiko would have failed regardless. We were too easily distracted and hadn’t really thought through the strategic implications of owning a standalone calendaring property (hint: no one wants a calendar without email). A short time later we were burned out and spending most of our time playing Xbox with the Reddit guys in Davis Square—hardly a startup success story. → Read More
We know that email has done away with the nine to five job but does anyone ignore emails over holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving anymore? A new study by email software company Xobni suggests that going completely offline from email over the holidays may also be a thing of the past. According to the survey, 59 percent of U.S. working adults will check work email over holidays.
Of the survey respondents over half (55%) check work email at least once a day and more than one in four (28%) do so multiple times throughout the day. The data also showed that 79 percent of those that check email while on holiday stated that they have received a work-related email from a colleague or client on holidays. → Read More
A new study by email software purveyor Xobni confirms what we bloggers know to be true, there’s actually no such thing as a day off in the Internet age (Want more visceral proof than an email study? Check out the timestamp of this post).
Information anxiety has pretty much put the kibosh on “time off” as two out of three Americans and Brits check their email outside of regular business hours (ha) and half of Americans email while on vacation (double ha).
The Xobni study, an online survey of 2,200 British and American adults conducted in August, holds that the traditional 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo, due to the fact that Americans and Brits can’t stop checking their email. Apparently we sneak a peak at our inboxes while on vacation, weekends, sick days and even when we are (gasp!) in bed. → Read More
Back in June, Xobni co-founder Adam Smith wrote a blog post announcing he was moving on from the company, and handing over the CTO reins. We’ve just confirmed that fellow co-founder Matt Brezina has also left the company.
The timing of Brezina’s departure isn’t fully clear, but we hear it was also a few weeks ago — he just didn’t have the big blog post about it. Obviously, having both co-founders leave so closely to one another is a bit odd. It was only this past April that they raised a large $16.2 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures. Talk was that this put their post-money valuation at around $65 million. The company also recently moved into a new office in the SoMa area of San Francisco (Twitter’s old offices, actually) and crazy mural spending aside, it would seem that things were fine on the surface. → Read More
On the heels of the as of yet unprofitable Demand Media IPO filing, it looks like email software purveyor Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards) has decided to spend money on a mural. And an elaborate one at that. While the rest of the country is gearing up for a second recession, the tech sector seems blissfully exempt with inflated billion dollar valuations being flung left and right. Will startup burn rates follow suit? → Read More
Social email startup Xobni is channeling Microsoft today. The company is now selling the premium version of its product, called Xobni Plus, which the company rolled out last year, in a number of stores. The boxed software, which will be featured in stores right next to the newly released Microsoft Office 2010 software, will be sold at Office Max, Fry’s and a few other brick and mortar establishments, putting Xobni in 3,500 stores in total. Xobni Plus will also be sold on Amazon.
Xobni is hoping to capitalize on some of the foot traffic that Microsoft will be bringing to stores for the new version of Office. Office is carried in 35,000 brick and mortar stores, and Xobni says that its software is currently in 10% of those stores, and will be adding its offering to more stores soon. The price for the boxed set will be the same as it is online: a one time fee of $29.95. → Read More
One of the startups that pitched the crowd last week at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam, and whose co-founder Rahul Vohra myself and the other jury members crowned the best presenter of the bunch, was Rapportive, which loftily promises to “make email a better place”.
I promised myself to check out their product extensively over the weekend, and now that I did I’m seriously glad to have discovered them as their free software has already made my Gmail experience much better. Rapportive is like Xobni for Gmail. → Read More
Xobni, a social Microsoft Outlook plugin, has just raised $16.2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures, with Baseline Ventures, Atomico Ventures, First Round Capital, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Cisco participating in the round. We confirmed this with the company. This brings Xobni’s total funding to over $30 million.
Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail smarter (Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). The plugin integrates LinkedIn, Twitter Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers and more into your Outlook inbox. CEO Jeff Bonforte tells us the plugin has seen 5 million downloads to date. → Read More
It took almost a year, but Xobni finally released its email app for the Blackberry. It works as a standalone app integrated with the email on your Blackberry, but similar to Xobni’s Outlook plugin, it ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.
Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni is introducing another product which may turn out to be more important in the long run. It is called Xobni One, and it syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. As Xobni rolls out more apps in the future, Xobni One should be able to sync contacts across those as well (very Mesh-like). → Read More
As we first reported on Friday, Microsoft is adding some social hooks into Outlook 2010. Outlook will gain the ability to pull in profile information, photos, and update streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. You can try the LinkedIn plugin now in beta. The other social networks will be added later when Outlook 2010 goes on sale, probably in July.
The new social features make it look a lot more like Xobni, the social email startup backed by Vinod Khosla that Microsoft looked at buying nearly two years ago. Well, a poor man’s Xobni. With Xobni, which itself is a plugin for Outlook, you can pull in relevant contact information, photos, and social stream data from both LinkedIn and Facebook today. It also supports Twitter, and Hoover’s information on companies. Salesforce integration is currently in beta, and SharePoint is coming soon. → Read More
Tonight, Xobni is selectively allowing users to download a new version of its client with a number of UI enhancements. This launch coincides with Xobni’s new Salesforce extension. This is notable because it marks the launch of premium extensions for the first time, that give the company a new potential revenue stream.
Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot, there’s a new set of horizontal tabs to better filter content. Xobni is also now surfacing links exchanged between contacts for the first time — previously, there was just a way to do this for files exchanged. Also new, the Twitter extension element now includes a direct message (DM) option. LinkedIn support has been improved, as has some of the analytics. → Read More
Earlier tonight, Xobni quietly released, at least to some users, a new version of its Outlook plug-in that brings Twitter streams into your email in an intelligent way. Instead of acting like any other Twitter client and showing you the full stream of everyone you follow, it shows you only the recent Tweets of the person whose email you are reading, whether or not you follow them on Twitter. (A Xobni blog post went up briefly about it and then was taken down, but not before I was able to grab this screenshot).
Instead of replicating Twitter outright, it shows you the Tweets in the context of an email to help you learn more about the person with whom you are communicating. This is consistent with the way Xobni brings up similar information about a contact from Facebook or LinkedIn or Skype. If you don’t know the person, it gives you some more context. If you do, it gives you something personal to talk about. → Read More
In venture capital, Vinod Khosla likes to go his own way, which is why he’s been so successful. He was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and then moved to venture capital and became a star partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he backed Juniper Networks, Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7 billion) and NexGen (sold to AMD and formed the basis for its challenge to Intel). About five years ago, after becoming a billionaire, he left Kleiner and started Khosla Ventures to invest his own money. He was mostly drawn to clean tech at a time before it was popular, but still kept his hand in Web and other tech startups (Aliph|Jawbone, iSkoot, RingCentral, Tapulous, iLike, Slide, Xobni). Khosla Ventures already has more than 50 companies in its portfolio (see slides below).
Earlier this month, Khosla raised $1.1 billion for two new funds, taking money from outside investors for the first time. I spoke with Khosla on the phone about his new fund, his approach to investing, clean tech and more. He compares Web startups to water startups, dismisses entrepreneurs who think about exits before building value, and contends that cleantech companies can command as high margins as hardware or software companies. “It’s a business strategy decision,” he explains.”
In the interview, Khosla talks about his investments in Aliph, RingCentral, eASIC, iSkoot, and Xobni. In terms of what he’s looking for, he declares “we love material science.” And in his seed fund, in particular, he says, “We’re not looking for completeness in things. We’re not looking for business plans. We are not looking for meeting every fiduciary requirement of an investor. We are looking for great technical ideas and great technologists.”
The 25-minute interview and full transcript are after the jump. I’ve bolded parts for emphasis. → Read More
Xobni, a startup that looks to make your inbox a little less chaotic, is well known for walking away from an acquisition offer from Microsoft last year, not long after being publically complimented by Bill Gates. Since then the service has continued to grow, with over 2 million downloads in the last year and an avid user base. But until now, there’s been one big piece of the puzzle missing: a source of revenue. Tonight, Xobni is finally turning the cash-flow spigot to “On” with the release of a new upgrade to Xobni called Xobni Plus, which introduces a number of enhanced search features sure to be welcomed by Xobni faithful.
Xobni Plus has a heavy emphasis on improving search, which is one of the key components the service has always been based around. Users will now be able to craft more advanced search queries, using either a GUI-based ‘query builder’ or Xobni’s own markup language, which lets you manually specify attributes like “attachment=yes” or “from=Jason” (Gmail offers similar search features, and they are very handy once you’ve gotten a hang of them). Other improvements include Xobni’s autosuggest feature, which can use linked Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to pair Email address with full names, as well as the ability to search within your Xobni ‘feeds’ in the sidebar. → Read More
It’s been just one month since email startup Xobni got an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund, which brought its total B round up to $10 million, and already it has a working prototype for an upcoming Blackberry app. Xobni executives were showing off the app at a Mobile Meetup in San Francisco last night, and the screenshot above found its way into my inbox (which is “xobni” spelled backwards, you know).
The app was working, and could be released sometime this summer, according to my source. The photo above shows the app on a Blackberry Bold, and appears to be showing off its contact search functionality. You type in a few letters, and it returns the contact information for every match in your inbox (even people who you haven’t necessarily added to your address book yet). I wonder what else it can do. → Read More
With the news that Facebook is going to begin allowing developers to incorporate full streams into their applications, developers are scrambling to get their apps up to speed. This morning we got our first look at the upcoming new version of Seesmic Desktop, and now we’ve learned that Xobni, the popular Outlook plugin that helps make Email easier to manage, will be going live with a new upgrade beginning at 6 PM tonight. Because of the way Xobni is built users won’t have to download an upgrade either – all changes will be server side.
Up until now Xobni has included some basic Facebook contact information, including profile photos and status updates, but it wasn’t as comprehensive as your full Facebook news feed (you couldn’t see how your contacts were interacting with each other, for example). Now you’ll be able to see this information at a glance directly from your Outlook mail client, which is obviously far more efficient than having to manually check your Facebook page. → Read More
